President Obama

[Dante]

...perfectly suitable schools already available for the children of lower income families.

Ah, segregation. It makes everything better when you can't see the poor/Jewish/Welsh/etc.

[chatfsh]

How could anyone possibly qualify what I described as segregation when everyone starts out with the same opportunities and choices?  We are told in advance, if you go down path A this will be the outcome, if you go down path B or C, this will be the consequence.  Everyone has the opportunity to choose which path they wish to take.  It is the choices that the individuals make that limit their options, not some arbitrary inherent quality or attribute associated with the person that limits their options.

[Dante]

But people don't start out with the same oppotunities. QED.

[Edric O]

During my university years, I was definitely more of the type A student. However, I wasn

[chatfsh]

Edric O, at the moment, I don

[nemafakei]

I look forward to reading this thread through properly - if I ever get the chance. In the meantime, I feel inclined to take issue with the closing remarks of this "top 2%" student.

"And the problem doesn't come from you being greedy. The problem comes from an economic system that makes you expect, and feel entitled to, rewards of material wealth in exchange for your efforts. If the rewards came instead in the form of fame, official recognition, appreciation in the eyes of your peers, more choices in selecting your next job, a better office or work schedule, etc., then the problem would go away."

Not really. The problem comes from an economic system based on enabling those who already have money to invest to become even richer at the expense of those who have too little. It's a system where effort is neither sufficient nor necessary to reap rewards, because what effect it does have is drowned our by the dice of fate and privilege. It's augmented by a culture of disqualification in which those whose rights to the basics of life are expected to be - and to have been - moral paradigms in every way lest they be deemed unworthy of assistance by the supposedly generous benefactors. We are trained to see only the good in those who profit, and only the bad in those who flounder, and so the prejudice proves itself.

There's nothing wrong with valuing extra effort with a bigger share of the material pie. It's shovelling more pie than anyone could eat onto one person's plate while others go hungry that's the problem.

[chatfsh]

Edric, I would like to start by clarifying one thing.  I didn't mean to say that you nauseate me, but rather, it was your over the top rant that did the job.  As you stated, none of this should be taken personally.

So do I feel entitled to a better salary than average? No. Not one cent. To the extent that my eventual salary will be above average, I feel it will be undeserved, and I will try to redress this problem by donating the excess to charity (though I reserve the right to define communist causes as "charity" ;) ). I may be better and more deserving than the worst students in my class, but I am by no means more deserving than the average students. In fact, many of my friends work MUCH harder than me, but still get lower grades because their natural talents lie elsewhere.

My university student example was highlighting the difference between students who applied themselves and those who slacked off.  Any student who works hard at their studies would fall into the student A category.  Usually, even if their grades are not perfect, the faculty may still appreciate the strong effort and the solid grades, and therefore may still help the student network toward gainful employment.

Am I "working smarter" than others? Am I making "prudent decisions" with my life? What a load of bullsh*t! I am successful because I love academic work and have a natural talent for logic and mathematics, and because our society has arbitrarily decided to value these traits above others. It's not a question of "incentives," either - I'm not doing anything for the money, and I've never met an intelligent person who said she would do physical labour if being a doctor/lawyer/scientist didn't pay better. All good scientists and academics do what they do because they like it.

Granted, there are those who may possess superior natural ability, whether it be intelligence or athletic ability, but for the most part, we are all in the same boat.  In the case of you and your classmates, upon graduating, I doubt that you all would be competing for just one job.  The other students, who are diligently applying themselves will likely do well in their employment search, unless the economy is so bad by then that none of you end up with a job.

I also contend that if the physician

[Dante]

The idea is that Edric is appealing to a higher moral standard, and judging the capitalist system by it. So while it is personal opinion, it's not completely arbitrary. I imagine he's calling on the principles of fairness, mostly.

Take the matter of education, as it so helpfully cropped up. Herein lies the reasoning, as I see it:

True or false: Children are not responsible for the actions of their parents.  True.

True or false: All children deserve the best education.  True, and I'd love to see you prove otherwise.

True or false: This being the case, the highest standards of education should be available to all. Those who can afford more can do so if they wish, but they cannot afford better because there is no better.

Conclusion: Any system whereby children are educated differently according to plutocracy must be inherently unfair, as it grants opportunities to those who have no claim save cash, and denies said opportunities to the disadvantaged.

Regardless of how accurate it might be, that rant did sound very feudal. "How could she get the same as me? I'm better than her!" Divine Right of Kings, indeed. I think like that to a degree, but from a rather different standpoint.

[chatfsh]

The idea is that Edric is appealing to a higher moral standard, and judging the capitalist system by it. So while it is personal opinion, it's not completely arbitrary. I imagine he's calling on the principles of fairness, mostly.

Fairness, ok fine.  But fairness needs to be applied evenly across the board.  Consider my example of the students and of the athletes -- is it fair that those who diligently applied themselves to achieve the best results are forced to share their rewards with those who chose not to apply themselves?  No, that is not fair by any standard.

Take the matter of education, as it so helpfully cropped up. Herein lies the reasoning, as I see it:

True or false: Children are not responsible for the actions of their parents.  True.

True or false: All children deserve the best education.  True, and I'd love to see you prove otherwise.

True or false: This being the case, the highest standards of education should be available to all. Those who can afford more can do so if they wish, but they cannot afford better because there is no better.

Conclusion: Any system whereby children are educated differently according to plutocracy must be inherently unfair, as it grants opportunities to those who have no claim save cash, and denies said opportunities to the disadvantaged.

This line of reasoning oversimplifies the matter.  I would argue that you can no more separate a child

[Andrew]

True or false: Children are not responsible for the actions of their parents.  True.

True or false: All children deserve the best education.  True, and I'd love to see you prove otherwise.

True or false: This being the case, the highest standards of education should be available to all. Those who can afford more can do so if they wish, but they cannot afford better because there is no better.

Conclusion: Any system whereby children are educated differently according to plutocracy must be inherently unfair, as it grants opportunities to those who have no claim save cash, and denies said opportunities to the disadvantaged.

There is a basic education that children should get. But it is not possible for all children to get the highest education possible (put low quality day cares out of business?)

I'm looking at this from a point of:

True or False: Low income people should get bursaries so they can eat at a high end restaurant. Get bursary for sports car, big house, 52" tv etc. This should not occur. Only those that can afford it can get it.

Same with high quality daycare. Unless your child shows some sort of genius factor at young age, then your average kid should not be enrolled in high quality if you can't afford it. If every kid gets best day care possible, then it puts low quality daycare out of business. With every kid going to best daycare, and all these low income people not paying for it, that means the wealthy have to pay for low income kids to go to same daycare as their children?

As with say university, there are grants/sholarships for smart people so they can go. If they dont' have money they can get loans and repay after they graduate. With daycare if the parents want to put kid in overpriced daycare maybe they should take out a loan? Why expect wealthy to pay for it? Yes wealthy should help pay into basic daycare (taxes), but not pay so every low income family can send kids to elite daycare.

Should doctor/dentist/professional get paid same as janitor or other basic job? If no, then there are things that wealthy can purchase that are not in reach of low income. Why should doctor/dentist pay to send janitor kids to elite/expensive daycare? Maybe the doctor/dentist should become janitor since there are no benefits to being wealthy if everyone else is entitled (and not have to pay!) to get exactly what they get?

[Dante]

I don't claim to have moral high ground, Hwi, if you were more experienced in PRP you'd know that. What I do is point out inconsistancies in the moral beliefs of others, rather than compare them to my own.

For example, what you're basically saying is that a child's right to education is less important than ensuring that different ("unwise") life decisions by their parents are punished. Take it that the quality of education is inseperable from conditions of birth, a point that you made that I'm keeping for the sake of argument. Your position appears to be that it is of greater value to maintain those conditions of birth than it is to ensure that the child has as good an education as any other.

So basically you're treading on disadvantaged children. I don't need to make any moral calling on that because it's almost universally regarded as bad. Whether I think so is immaterial compared to whether you think so. If you do, you're a hypocrite. If you don't, good luck persuading others of the merits of your cause.

I dislike loans, Andrew. I dislike usury, I dislike debt, and the current financial debacle is just one example of why. People should not have to borrow beyond their means to afford education. Indeed, people should be discouraged from borrowing at all. But that doesn't mean that some things should be unavailable. That's what the western world is all about of course, opportunity and classlessness...

[nemafakei]

"At Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford

[Andrew]

Remember when Bush was playing golf while the terrorists were planning to attack the USA?

Now we have Obama playing golf while there is a flu epidemic and financial crisis.

Obama gets in a round of golf on a sunny morning

100 days, 100 mistakes for Obama

[chatfsh]

For example, what you're basically saying is that a child's right to education is less important than ensuring that different ("unwise") life decisions by their parents are punished.

No, that is not what I am saying.  I have clearly stated that a certain level of standard education should be established by the state and made available to all children, regardless of their circumstances.  This is the case with the free public school system in the U.S.

However, there may be institutions that decide to go above and beyond the standard education offering.  This however, comes at a premium.  These schools may take the form of private schools where tuition must be paid in order to attend or it can be a public school located in an affluent area where the parents volunteer their time and money to give their children more.  Is there anything morally wrong with this system?

Take it that the quality of education is inseparable from conditions of birth, a point that you made that I'm keeping for the sake of argument. Your position appears to be that it is of greater value to maintain those conditions of birth than it is to ensure that the child has as good an education as any other.

I believe that society should strike a balance between holding parents accountable for their decisions that affect themselves and their future children and seeing to the basic welfare of the child.

Do not overlook the fact that I have already stated that all children are entitled to a good education regardless of their parent's circumstances.  For practical reasons the government determines and defines what constitutes a

[Dunenewt]

Ah, segregation. It makes everything better when you can't see the Welsh.

Oh it really does, but they still seem to pop up everywhere.

Spoken like someone who

[chatfsh]

Luckily I'm clever enough to do that, and by the time I'm your age, still be earning a six figure salary :P

Somehow I seriously doubt that

[Dunenewt]

Don't make dreams, live them.

The point here is that they are your earnings to do as you see fit instead of someone coming in and telling you how it should be spent.

Why?  The great American system has provided you with the means to earn this money, so surely they should tell you how it should be spent?

[nemafakei]

"With the point being that the ivy league institutions would attract the most talented teaching staff since they offer the best combination of financial compensation, prestige and recognition. "

But Oxford and Cambridge disprove what you're trying to argue: they are subject to the same bargaining agreements as every other university in England, and (up until a few years ago when variable fees to

[Wolf]

First of all, I remembered how I did color-text.

Second of all, the only thing I want to take issue with here is a comment that was made earlier that went along the lines of:

Not really. The problem comes from an economic system based on enabling those who already have money to invest to become even richer at the expense of those who have too little. It's a system where effort is neither sufficient nor necessary to reap rewards, because what effect it does have is drowned our by the dice of fate and privilege. It's augmented by a culture of disqualification in which those whose rights to the basics of life are expected to be - and to have been - moral paradigms in every way lest they be deemed unworthy of assistance by the supposedly generous benefactors. We are trained to see only the good in those who profit, and only the bad in those who flounder, and so the prejudice proves itself.

The issue here, I think, is that the introductory premise of your argument is flawed. You would be right--and in fact, your comments regarding the "moral paradigms" of society are right--provided of course that every person with capital who reinvested that money to become richer necessarily did so at the expense of others. What's great about this issue, and PRP in general, is that everyone is only mostly right. Everyone here has been saying great stuff, and in general there's a lot of overlap, but the devil is usually in these details. I don't think it's demonstrably evident that even a majority of today's Elites profit directly from the expense of others. Absolutely, some do.

But, first of all, none of this is a zero-sum game.

And second of all, the wealth of today's Elites is so great--the people Hwi are talking about--that I think the continual expenses of the masses are insufficient to explain that wealth, mathematically-speaking.

Third of all, unless individuals are directly responisble for "the expense of others," we can't make such broad or generalized comments about how society, capitalist or socialist, should function. There's an inverse relationship between the number of transactions that occur between you and an end result and the amount of responsibility you bear for that end result. In reality, therefore, we could only "prosecute" the rich on a case-by-case basis. Given the available data, could Capitalist X reasonably have known the result of conducting transactions with Capitalist Y, who conducted further transactions with Capitalists Z and Douchebag?

Fourth of all, even if you were right in your initial assumption that enough of a majority of today's capital-controllers reinvest that capital at the direct expense of others, that still would not justify the socialist society envisioned by Edric, lamented by Hwi, and tacitly-supported by yourself. If your assumption was right, it would only justify the persecution of the rich. What we're talking about is a system whereby the poor, not-so-poor and not-so-rich are granted roughly the same standards in education and health care. Sure, that system makes it somewhat harder for the not-so-rich to become vastly rich (let's be honest here, Edric and Hwi are both wrong about the standards of wealth they're applying to make their arguments--the graph of individuals in the population (X) vs. wealth possessed by individuals in terms of annual income USD (Y) is geometrical: 80% are under 6 figures, but there is 1% or so above 7, and a further tenth above 8, and a further hundredth above even that, and these latter assholes within this 1% are the people that you socialists despise, not the 20% who hunger to climb to that 1% and who, by the very actions entailed by this, drive the vast majority of economic activity) but those aren't the people you want to bring down in any case. Who do want to bring down? Well, if you're asking yourself this question, you probably don't read within parantheses. That's okay, I've actually found that most people don't.

EDIT & PS: Also, Edric, you should never have told me that you were still a college student. I always envisioned you as some crazed, white-haired 40ish/50ish Hegelian-type locked in a Soho apartment with his two cats and a corncob pipe. Not only is this vision now utterly shattered, but it also makes your earlier point about making a point about not owning any "capital" in the techincal sense far less remarkable or cool. This is not to imply that you won't necessarily continue to eschew ownership of capital; it is just hard for people in your position to do so in any case without the benefit of fortunate circumstances of birth.

[Dunenewt]

When I met him, he didn't have any cats on his person, although there may have been one hidden in his bag...

I wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that Edric doesn't know the world for what it is, rather than just read about it, just because he's a student though.

[Wolf]

Oh no, Newt, absolutely. Look, in this day and age, the vast majority of anyone's knowledge is going to be academic or, for lack of a better term, second-hand. Sure, I've tried my hand at a few professions over the years, but that doesn't mean the scope of my interests or activites should be limited to those few fields. What I was getting at with Edric, however, is that... were he truly the archetype of the tweed-jacketed, ancient-yet-still-sharp professor, then the fact that he owned no capital, in any form would be--in my eyes--a truly remarkable feat. As a young'n, he hasn't yet had the chance to take on the world fully, but, I imagine, when he does he'll stick to his principles.

[chatfsh]

"With the point being that the ivy league institutions would attract the most talented teaching staff since they offer the best combination of financial compensation, prestige and recognition. "

But Oxford and Cambridge disprove what you're trying to argue: they are subject to the same bargaining agreements as every other university in England, and (up until a few years ago when variable fees to

[Edric O]

Hwi, I've got about half of my reply to your long post typed up, but unfortunately it looks like the other half will need to wait a couple of days (unless I find more spare time somehow... hmm, sleeping less, that always seems to work... ;) ).

In the mean time, here's a quick post.

EDIT & PS: Also, Edric, you should never have told me that you were still a college student. I always envisioned you as some crazed, white-haired 40ish/50ish Hegelian-type locked in a Soho apartment with his two cats and a corncob pipe. Not only is this vision now utterly shattered, but it also makes your earlier point about making a point about not owning any "capital" in the techincal sense far less remarkable or cool. This is not to imply that you won't necessarily continue to eschew ownership of capital; it is just hard for people in your position to do so in any case without the benefit of fortunate circumstances of birth.

But Wolf, I didn't tell you anything you could not have already guessed, since my age is displayed in my profile. If it helps you regain your shattered image of me, though, I'll only be a college student for a few more weeks, I intend to become a professor, and cats are my favourite pet (though I don't have one right now). So it's entirely possible that I will completely fit your mental picture in 20 years or so. Except for living in Soho. And wearing tweed jackets.

Now, as for not owning any means of production, most people are in a position where they could buy a couple of shares if they really wanted to, and maybe have some money in a pension plan that technically makes them part owners of some company, but can't really hope to own sufficient amounts of capital to derive a meaningful income from it. So yes, you're right that it's not terribly impressive for a college student not to own means of production, but I would say the same holds true for nearly everyone. In general it's not terribly impressive not to own means of production. Most people don't. Sticking to my principles on this issue is really easy.

[chatfsh]

Hwi, I've got about half of my reply to your long post typed up, but unfortunately it looks like the other half will need to wait a couple of days (unless I find more spare time somehow... hmm, sleeping less, that always seems to work... ;) ).

How very thoughtful of you to provide that explanation.  And just when I was beginning to feel neglected. :)

[Andrew]

You know the Republican party is broken when...

29 year Republican Senator Arlen Specter changes to Democrat